Spaventa Residential Neighborhood Case Study: From Strategy to Project Alessandro Gaiani

The economic crisis, the exponential growth of single-parent families, the lack of integration in the social housing areas of foreign immigrants of different ethnic groups and precarious working conditions, has led to the disintegration of the "social" space and residential urban heritage. Its redefinition takes place with a theoretical and methodological approach that includes memory, innovation and sustainability leading the mutation of spaces towards the assumption of new value by using tools of hybridization. The proposal of the conversion of 9 public residential buildings in the “Spaventa” district in Milan, built early 20th century and now characterised by a spatial and social alienation, is based on the architectural theory of circular re-conditioning: the contamination between place and object capable of reactivating the identity of "discarded" urban elements, where the absence of adequate space and technological equipment has led to a physical and symbolic obsolescence. The main tasks are the ones that follow: - A circular strategy based on the re-conditioning of the existing by recognizing a value to the current waste; - Involve the community in the project through a new system of communication and dialogue; - Define new adaptive intervention tools able to change their configuration without structural duties to respond to the ever-changing market of households. The methodological process uses the one proposed in 2003 by Haeckel, Adaptabily loop, updated on 5 points (one new): the sense, which defines a new spatiality for housing, the interpretation where the elements of the process take shape, both circular and adaptive, redefining the sense of identity through architecture and a participated communication, the decision defines the intervention strategy, resilience, the ability of a system to adapt to change following a high impact event; the act determines the operative tools, a series of "adaptive grafts", “box in the box ", light, reversible, made of wood, that are repeated identically inside the lodgings creating different configurations; the outcome, a project that combines architecture's own tools with social and communication ones that can revitalize a neighbourhood and make it habitable again.